Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno by Mike Barry Page B

and they did their job. That was all that mattered to him. If he wanted to get personal he would do it with Janice or with some people he had to deal with in Mexico City; he did not have to get emotionally tied up with the servants like so many other people he could think of. It was shocking how people could be intimidated by their servants. Carlin thought that kind of thing was disgraceful. As far as he was concerned they were merely furniture.
    Thinking of Janice, though, left the issue of the body, and Carlin decided that this was exactly what he was going to do: leave the issue as it was. Maybe this showed that he had gone off the deep end, that the pressure had cracked him and rendered him crazy, but if this was the case it was just something with which he would have to live, he wouldn’t be the first person he had known who had gone crazy nor the last for that matter. Wulff was crazy. No, it made sense to leave the body and travel light, let Joe and Dick take care of the matter. There was a hell of a lot of blood but otherwise it could be said that Janice looked as good in death as she had in life. Which wasn’t very good at all. She was a big, fat-assed broad who had those remarkable tits, which bobbled and swayed in bed and which he couldn’t no matter how hard he tried stuff all the way into his mouth, but that just showed you that passion was no patron of the arts, passion was an old man with a limp and a glass eye. The hell with it. He let her lie.
    He would travel light. He had his schedule all mapped out, Carlin thought, as he threw together one light valise and prepared to leave his mansion in the desert—that was how he thought of it,
mansion in the desert
, actually it was just an eight-room house with a couple of sleep-in rooms for Dick and Joe, but it was always a distinguishing thing to think of yourself as someone living in a mansion—prepared to take a flight out of Phoenix just as quickly as he could. He would head toward Mexico City; he had a hell of a lot of friends in Mexico City who owed him favors and would be glad to put him up; he would sink underground there and just wait the whole thing out. He had twenty teams of his own after Wulff; the FBI, the NYPD, and practically every agency of the government was after him as well; there were a thousand freelancers, each of them with his picture in their pocket ready to take a shot at him. No, there was no way that the guy could stay in action much longer. His time, even with his phenomenal luck and his energetic craziness could be measured in a matter of weeks. Maybe days. However long it was, Carlin could wait it out longer in perfect safety, and then as soon as word of his enemy’s demise came through—as it certainly would, because Carlin had the best sources of information in the world—well, as soon as word got through that Wulff had been killed, Carlin would be on his way home with the equivalent of a million dollars in his pocket. Make that two million. Shit, make that five. There was absolutely no saying how far he could go once Wulff was out of the way. And he would be—soon. Carlin could close his eyes and get just a whiff of what it would be like when Wulff was no longer there, and it was crazy; it made his genitals stir. So much for Janice.
    Travel light. Carlin put together a suitcase with underwear and shaving materials, put in one suit, and left the room quickly. Down the stairs and into the living room, out to the veranda for a last look at the blooming desert before he left it for a while. The sound of Joe coming up behind him was almost shocking, so locked had Carlin been into the necessity for a private moment, just communing by himself with his house and his garden. But that was the way it was; there were no such things as private moments, only little abcesses yanked out of time and then lanced by intrusion, and Joe, that physician, was now destroying his own little pocket.
    “You all right?” Joe said. He was a short man